Kenyan political commentary loves a moral crusade. Whenever goon culture flares up or femicide numbers spike, pundits demand a return to good values. They throw abstract ideals at a bleeding wound, ignoring a harsh reality: this violence is an economic product manufactured by the state.
The Kenyan state has abandoned its duty to build a productive economy. Instead, the ruling class has advanced a deliberate politics of violence by systematically hollowing out public goods like basic healthcare and education. To protect its power, the state has criminalized peaceful public gatherings and progressive protests. By destroying public welfare and the right to organize, the government creates a massive pool of desperate, starving youth, and then recruits these exact dispossessed people to serve as foot soldiers for its political syndicates.
This crisis is accelerated by the state’s aggressive push toward a unstable service economy, typified by the boda boda sector. We have yet to realize how terribly this model has failed ordinary Kenyans. Many youth were actually better off as smallholder farmers than they are inside this service trap. As farmers, they at least had direct access to food. Today, they face grinding, unpredictable hunger.
The militias terrorizing our society are the direct byproduct of this failure to build a productive, labor-absorbing economy. Ideology means nothing to an empty stomach. When a system strips an entire generation of dignity, survival becomes the only metric that matters. If a corrupt politician or a gang leader offers a starving person a small payout or a single meal, they will take it. Survival will always defeat rhetoric. You cannot lecture someone out of starvation.
This reality exposes the profound failure of Kenya’s progressive left. Pushing abstract theories and academic tweets without caring for the immediate survival of the people is an elitist hobby, not a movement. If the left wants to dismantle the militia pipeline, the strategy cannot be more webinars. It must be mutual aid.
Mutual aid is not charity; it is collective survival. By establishing communal food programs and localized economic safety nets, progressive movements can offer a tangible alternative to state neglect. When communities feed and protect their own, they break the monopoly that violent syndicates hold over the desperate.
This material vacuum also reveals the direct line between economic neglect and the crisis of femicide. When a system strips men of economic agency, the resulting shame and rage do not simply vanish. In a patriarchal society, that displaced frustration turns downward onto the most vulnerable. Economic failure creates a pressure cooker of toxic masculinity, where violence against women becomes a horrific, misplaced outlet for control.
Militias and femicide are twin symptoms of an economy that refuses to care for its people. If we want to kill goon culture, our politics must focus entirely on material needs. Until progressive movements build an infrastructure of real, physical care that meets people at their point of hunger, the state’s pipeline of violence will keep winning.